


The Armageddon Game

by lowflyingfruit



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Characters Added As They Appear - Freeform, Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-05-03
Updated: 2019-06-02
Packaged: 2020-02-18 12:20:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 12,641
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18699499
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lowflyingfruit/pseuds/lowflyingfruit
Summary: Thanos has won and half the life in the universe has been erased. But the Avengers are only defeated, not dead, and they and their allies are going to do something about it. If they can ever work out how, or even what they're going to do, or if they can work together long enough to do it.One thing's for sure, though - with Thanos attempting to destroy the Infinity Stones, their opportunities are running out, and this time, avenging the world is not enough.





	1. Dust in the Wind

**Author's Note:**

> NOTE THE LACK OF ARCHIVE WARNINGS.
> 
> This fic is fully planned out, beginning to end, and I have elected not to use the major character death warning. This does not mean that this story does not contain the possibility of major character death.

**The Armageddon Game: a game of chess guaranteed to produce a decisive result, because if there is a draw, it is ruled a victory for Black...**

 

The pager went off while Carol was between ship and planet. She checked it and got a shock.

_Nick Fury?_

It had been a long time since she’d heard from Fury. What, twenty years? Twenty-five? It couldn’t be thirty, could it? The thing was that he wouldn’t call her if it wasn’t important. She’d made him promise.

Now, which way was Earth?

Carol stopped, oriented herself by the stars, and blasted off towards her own home planet. She probably didn’t visit enough anyway. Once she was done dealing with whatever it was Fury needed her for, she could visit Maria and Monica, and then come right back. A few hours travelling, a few hours dealing with the emergency, she could do this.

Earth really was one of the backwaters of the universe. This had better be worth the flight. Whatever had happened to Xandar three days ago was going to make that much more work for her.

She had to slow down when she reached Earth. The signal had come from the northern hemisphere. The US, it looked like. New York. She was arriving after dark, but though many of the buildings were lit up, it looked as thought there was no traffic. Carol frowned. She couldn’t even _hear_ any.

When she flew low, she saw that most streets, in _New York City_ , were choked by stationary cars and just as many car crashes. She found the communicator she’d given Fury lying by a big black car, dropped like trash. No sign of Fury, and it wasn’t the sort of thing that would go off just if someone dropped it.

What was going on here?

Carol jumped to the top of the car and looked around for people. Most of the people she could see were staring, many of them with eyes red from crying, and grouped in little huddles. She went for the direct route. “Hey,” she said, to the nearest group, a man, two women, and a boy of maybe eleven or twelve. “What happened here?”

The man burst into tears and one of the women started rubbing his back comfortingly. The other woman said, “They just - turned to dust. Right in front of us.”

“Who did?”

They looked at her as if she was mad. “Everyone,” the speaker said.

The boy added, “It’s happened all over the world. We saw it on the news. They said half the world is gone.”

Sick dread filled Carol’s stomach. If that was even ten percent right, it was a good reason for Fury to call her. “Is there someone who deals with that sort of thing?” she asked.

“Iron Man,” the second woman said. She was still clinging to the crying man. “Or maybe even Spiderman. But they weren’t here - I think they fought that spaceship -”

Iron Man and Spiderman. Creative names. “Where would I find them?” she asked. “Or  other people who might know what happened?”

“The Avengers,” the kid said. “They’ll know.”

Now _that_ \- that was a name. “And they’re…”

“Somewhere upstate,” the first woman said. She pointed to one of the towers,  lit up like all the rest were. If half the world’s population was missing, the power wouldn’t stay on for long. This tower  had an _A_ on it. Just an _A_. “That’s their symbol.”

“I can work with that,” Carol said. She prepared to take off, but before she did she looked at the small, miserable group. “Thanks,” she said, “and good luck.”

They were all going to need it. Carol took things slow as she flew through New York, trying to get some sense of what was happening. Chaos, mostly. Most streets were blocked from crashes and cars without drivers. Most people had things on their mind other than getting the obstructions cleared out. A few businesses were giving out food. Others were looking after children.

As she flew out, the chaos was less visible. There was the occasional car swerving around the wrecks, local schools and churches lit up like bonfires as people sought help in places the whole suburb or town went to. Behind closed doors the panic had to be just as bad.

It was almost a relief when she started flying over farms. Had half of all animal life vanished too? Plants?

Carol flew lower. Plants seemed fine. That was good. They might not starve. Might.

Fast as she was, it took a while to search the state of New York for the headquarters of these Avengers, but eventually she thought she found it. The power was on there, too, but unlike everywhere else, there was no sign of activity outside. It was the sort of place that gleamed. It didn’t look real. She had to wonder what sort of people would work here.

She wished Fury were there. She trusted his read, and this was the sort of thing he’d know about.

Touching down on the roof, Carol started searching for the people who had been supposed to save the planet first.

 

\---

 

The blue lady, Nebula, brandished what looked like a penlight at him, and to Tony’s embarrassment, he almost fell over. “Stay still,” she ordered. “This will help.”

“I really don’t think that you poking me with another bit of metal is going to help,” Tony said. “The guy who could do that - you know, the wizard - he got dusted, _and_ he’s not a surgeon anymore. Wait, other way round, he retired from surgery before he got vaporised.”

Then he did fall over, because he’d lost too much blood.  “Ow,” he said, side burning, and now, tailbone bruised.

Nebula glared at him. “Stay there,” she ordered. “I will treat you.”

Tony barely had enough particles left for armour. Nebula pulled his torn t-shirt away from the wound, cleaned it as best she could (which hurt), and then used the penlight-thing (which hurt more). To his surprise, when she was done, the wound didn’t look quite so raw. Still unpleasant, still painful, but less likely to kill him, and a long way from something he’d have to invent a new type of reactor to fix. She tacked the edges together with a few space butterfly bandages. “Now we go see what food we have,” she said. “You need to eat.”

Tony did not feel much like eating. “Maybe later.”

“Now,” Nebula said.

She left him to go searching for food somewhere else on board. The ship of the so-called Guardians wasn’t anywhere near as big as Squidward’s ship had been. That was another downside to the arrangement. On top of having less stuff, it was also a lot more homey. There were weapons lying on a table, where someone had been cleaning them. There were space postcards and posters on some of the walls. Tony was just thinking he’d rather gut himself with a spoon than sleep in the beds of the dead when Nebula stuck her head back  into the room. “What do humans eat?” she asked.

“Isn’t that Quill guy human?” Before he turned into dust.

“Most of the time I spent with Quill there were blasters drawn. Not - meals.”

Okay then. All buddies here. “Humans eat just about anything,” he said. “If I start throwing up that’s when you’ll know I can’t eat it.”

With that endorsement, Nebula shoved a container of something at him. Looked like brown sludge. Didn’t taste much better, either. He was pretty sure there was meat in it. “I’m done,” he said, after forcing a few mouthfuls down his throat. “Let’s get off this rock.”

“And go where?” Nebula asked.

“Earth,” Tony said. He had to know if Pepper was okay. Rhodey. They were probably okay. Those two were the most indestructible people he knew, after maybe Bruce. Happy was a little squishier but no less important.

But then, he’d thought Vision was tough, and yet Thanos succeeded therefore Thanos got the Mind Stone somehow therefore Vision was probably -

He had to tell May Parker -

“Earth’s definitely the place,” Tony said.

“Will Earth help me accomplish my goal of hunting down my father and killing him for what he did to my sister?”

“You may have some competition but I will argue for your position as first in line for Thanos-killing,” Tony promised.

“Good,” Nebula said. “Earth it is.”

Tony sat himself in the co-pilot’s seat and watched carefully as Nebula took off. The coordinates for Earth were already in the ship’s computer, which was good, because Tony wasn’t sure he could have entered them without a few hours looking at a galactic map. Though working out a different measurement system might have taken his mind off things.

Once he was sure he could fly the ship himself if he needed to, Tony settled further down into the seat and watched the stars. Awful things. All those scientists talking about the beauty out here hadn’t felt the cold of the void or fought the many, many aliens hellbent on destroying the universe.

At some point, he fell asleep, and only woke up when Nebula prodded him awake insisting that he suffer through another encounter with her magical healing penlight and another encounter with space food. This time he followed her into the little mess, or galley, or whatever you called the kitchen when it was on a spaceship. He found Nebula standing over a chest freezer, clutching a package of finger-shaped, royal blue fruits so hard they were splitting.

“Going to share?” Tony asked.

“I don’t like these,” she said, and shoved the package into Tony’s chest. “Eat.”

They were definitely better than the meat sludge, Tony had to admit, although the juice stained everything it touched. He tried to appreciate it for what it was, without thinking of the part where a woman had stashed that fruit in the freezer for a treat, and then been brutally murdered before she could enjoy it. If it was bad for him, it had to be worse for Nebula. It was her sister who’d been killed. If he’d had to bring the kid’s empty suit back - it didn’t bear thinking about.

None of it bore thinking about anyway.

On the third day, they stopped making those dizzying leaps that Nebula said were how small ships handled faster-than-light travel. This was more Tony’s wheelhouse. After three treatment with the healing penlight he was feeling better than he had any right to, for someone who’d been stabbed through the guts. He had the energy to try and get them back to Earth.

Only, when he looked at the power cells, he realised pretty quickly that they were screwed. “See there,” he said, pointing very carefully. “That is a decent sized chunk of metal stuck into a power cell, causing a slow leak.”

He looked carefully. It might have been repairable, had they picked it up earlier. Now the heat and the stress had warped the metal. That cell was not fit for purpose.

“So what do we do?” Nebula asked.

“Stop the drive before it blows us up,” Tony replied, “And hope we can make it to a regular spaceport on residual power.”

“There is _nothing_ out here,” Nebula hissed.

“Then I guess we just wait, and either get rescued or die,” Tony said.

Nebula did not take that as badly as some people Tony knew would have. She lifted her chin in grim acceptance and said, “I’ll adjust our course.”

That left Tony alone in the depths of the ship. Once he would have raged against the dying of the light hard as anyone. Harder. But he was tired, and he felt so old. He hated it out here, in this infinite empty space. He hated a lot of things. Thanos was at the top of the list.

If he was going to die, it wasn’t going to be looking into his post-traumatic nightmares. Tony started working on his helmet recorders and thought of Pepper instead.

 

\---

 

About ten minutes later, the breeze picked up. That was the thing that made Steve feel sickest. The breeze picked up and carried all that strange, thick, black dust away. All the dust that used to be living, breathing, people, carried east to west, swirling in the air, scattering in the ground. Bucky’s dust mixed with Sam’s dust, and Wanda’s dust, and T’Challa’s, and just plain dirt.

Vision’s corpse remained where it had fallen, that awful wound in his forehead where Thanos had pulled the Mind Stone right out.

Natasha was alive. Bruce. Thor.

Natasha, Bruce, and Thor were alive. Bucky,  Sam, and Wanda were gone. Or - or dead. Fifty percent.

With the rustling of the leaves, Steve broke the numb silence that seemed to hang over them like smoke. Like dust in the wind. “There’ll still be wounded on the field,” he said. And dead. Regular dead, not dust-dead, Wakandans who’d fallen in the battle. “We should go help.”

“Right,” Bruce said, sounding dazed. Maybe they should check him for concussion. Steve had no idea how hard he’d been hit. Natasha nodded crisply and went to check on him. Thor stared at the wide spatter of purple blood on the ground, knuckles white around the haft of that new axe of his, unmoving and unspeaking.

Okoye fell in next to Steve as he made his way back to the field. “I will take charge of the clean up here. I know these people,” she said. Her face was composed, but for the first time Steve could remember, her voice had a slight quiver to it.

“We’ll do what we can to help,” Steve promised. Whatever that was. Whatever it was worth. Fifty percent.

They had to do something about this. They were the _Avengers_ . _If we can’t protect the world_ , Tony had said. He’d been right. They couldn’t.

The battlefield was piled with corpses. Aliens, mostly. Thanos had not been careful with their lives. He and Nat searched the piles with the Dora Milaje, looking for living, wounded Wakandans. There weren’t many. Half as many as he’d expected, with a battle as hectic as this -

\- right.

“It’s going to be worse everywhere else,” Nat said abruptly. “Wakanda is small. High tech.

“I’m trying not to think about the highways right now,” Steve replied. The airports. The hospitals. All across the universe. How many thousands had died in the minutes after the Snap? How many tens of thousands in all the worlds out there? “Is Bruce okay?”

“A little whiplash, a few bruises. He’s had worse.”

“And Thor?”

Nat shook her head. “Still hasn’t moved or said anything. Bruce said to leave him, and that raccoon is still with him. I gather he didn’t come out of a fun situation even before this.” They worked in silence a little longer, and then Nat said, “Do you have a plan?”

Steve snorted. “Beyond ‘find Thanos and kill him’? No. Not yet. Ask me once we get a chance to stop and breathe.”

“That’s not going to happen for a while,” Natasha observed. “We’re going to have to make the time.” She looked at him. “We could use Tony’s help on this.”

They could. Steve _wanted_ Tony’s help on this. But who knew where he was? If he was even alive? Somehow Steve couldn’t imagine him dying like that.

In the end they only found time when night fell. Steve, Nat, Bruce, and Rhodey left the people shouting in the streets, still searching desperately for their loved ones, and went back to the clearing to find Thor. The sky above was clear. That seemed ominous in its own way, after the number of dead aliens Steve had seen that day with the branching electrical burns that marked someone who had well and truly pissed off the God of Thunder.

Thor was still standing stock still where they’d left him, but he looked up when they returned. “I failed,” he said hoarsely.

“You sure did,” the raccoon said.

“We all failed,” Steve said.

More gently, Nat said, “We’re going to take Vision back and hold a funeral for him. Will you come with us?”

Thor nodded. He pulled off his cape and wrapped Vision in it respectfully before picking up the body. “Where are we taking him?” he asked. “Rabbit, you are welcome to come with us.”

By that he seemed to mean the raccoon. The raccoon didn’t bat an eyelid at being called a rabbit. Steve would find out what that was about eventually. “Headquarters,” Steve said. “We’ll wait until Tony gets back.” If he got back. “He’ll want to be there for it.”

They’d lost so many people on this field, but Vision was the only one they were going to be able to bury. The funeral for him would have to do for all of them. They made a sombre procession back to the jet. There were sombre processions just about everywhere. They laid Vision out in the back, strapped themselves in, and started flying.

There were a lot of distress calls out there. The plane crashes Steve had feared had come to pass. Lots of stranded people. It bit at Steve not to go and help them, but there were just too many. There were too many for _anyone_. Bruce eventually pulled his jacket over his head and tried to nap.

Halfway across the Atlantic, Rhodey said, “I suppose it’s too much to hope for that Ross got dusted. Save me a court martial.”

“It’ll save us all a court martial,” Natasha said.

“Wouldn’t he have better things to do with his time?” Steve asked.

“Not Ross.” Bruce, from up the back, mumbling through his jacket. “Trust me on this one. _God_ , I’ve got a headache.”

Silence fell. Conversation itself felt strange. He didn’t know about the others, but he was fighting the urge to turn the plane around and go back to Wakanda, so he could join the others still searching for their loved ones.

“About that plan,” Natasha said, as the lights of the compound came into view. So strange, that it would be just like they’d left it. No signs of rioting or desperation. Just the building, fenced off, powered up, and still serene.

“We’re Avengers,” Steve said. “We avenge.”


	2. Those Remaining

There was a strange light flickering around the back of headquarters. More yellow than the lights Tony had insisted on. He was fussy about that sort of thing. White lights or nothing, and they had to be perfectly steady. This was a shifting, prismatic gold Tony would never allow near any of his workspaces. Natasha nudged Rhodey. Steve, when he saw where they were looking, narrowed his eyes too. The raccoon looked back and forth and decided to have nothing to do with it, sticking by Thor’s side.

Bruce was still resting. He had the worst physical injuries of any of them, for once. Thor, she did not trust right now. She didn’t like the look in his eyes - which, she realised abruptly, were now mismatched. What had  _ happened? _ All Bruce had said was that it was bad.

_ Bad  _ would have to wait, with  _ catastrophic _ and  _ unknown _ in front of them.

Without a word, Natasha gestured for Rhodey to stay with Steve and slipped out the hatch on the other side to circle around the source of the light.

“You got eyes on that?” Steve whispered into comms.

“Just about,” Natasha said. “Give me another second.”

A few more quiet steps, and Natasha could see through the window. She froze. That light - it was a  _ person _ . A glowing person. Oh, how she missed having both Clint and Tony on the team in moments like this. Either of them could find the right nickname in a second.

She still hadn’t heard from Clint. Or Laura. Or even the kids, who knew they could call her in an emergency. She’d called all the numbers she had for him and his family before they left Wakanda; nobody had answered. Could fifty percent be that cruel?

Natasha forced herself to keep her mind on the glowing woman standing outside their base, eyeing off their security systems. It was easier than it probably should have been. Too much practice. “Eyes on our intruder,” Natasha whispered. The intruder was practically ignoring the plane that had landed not all that far away.

This glowing woman had that arrogance to her that many of the most powerful beings Natasha had encountered did. Thor had had it, when they’d met; he’d grown out of it, mostly, with time and grief and Tony retelling the story of  _ you want me to put the hammer down?  _ five or six times. Bruce had it, in his less swaggering way. Even Vision, calm and kind, had something of it - that confidence that no mere  _ human _ could hurt them, that they didn’t even need situational awareness.

Steve had never been like that. Nor Wanda. They’d been hurt by humans too much to ever project that sort of heedlessness.

This woman had it in spades and Natasha would take advantage of it.

“Intruder’s glowing,” she said, voice barely reaching her own ears. The comms would take care of it. “It looks like it’s coming from inside her. Don’t think you should let her touch you. She doesn’t appear hostile. Just curious.”

“Got it,” Steve said. “We’ll engage, you stay back.”

Whatever was making the woman glow, it didn’t appear to enhance her senses. Either that or she was a formidable actor. Natasha edged closer, enough to put a bullet in her skull without fail if she turned on Steve. The woman turned her attention to Steve when he approached.

“Hello,” Steve said.

“You wouldn’t be the Avengers, would you?” she asked. Still no sign of overt hostility, but no caution either.

“Some of us,” Steve said.

The woman stopped glowing, like a lamp flicked out. “Carol Danvers,” she said, sticking out a hand to shake. “Don’t suppose you know who SHIELD are.”

Natasha raised her gun. The barest flicker of Steve’s eyes told her  _ wait _ . “We do,” said Steve, cautiously.

“You don’t trust them,” Danvers said, dropping her hand. “Great. Look, Nick Fury - you know  _ him _ , right - he called me. If that helps.”

“Fury called you?” Steve asked. “How?”

“I gave him a pager,” Danvers said. “Told him it was for emergencies. What I flew over looked like an emergency to me. He was gone when I arrived, vanished like the others. The people I talked to said the Avengers would know something about it.”

Natasha lowered her gun. “I think she’s telling the truth,” she said, and didn’t let an iota of satisfaction show when Danvers realised that someone had snuck up on her. It was next to nothing when Danvers dismissed Natasha as a potential threat.

She knew Steve noticed, but Steve tried not to think like she did. “We can use all the help we can get,” he said, and this time he was the one to offer his hand. “Steve Rogers.”

“Like Captain America?” Danvers asked, but Natasha was distracted by her phone giving a single buzz at her hip. She checked it - and left Steve and Rhodey to explain things to their new ally.

It was Clint.

Or someone calling on Clint’s phone, at least, and that was motivation enough for her to answer it despite her dread. What if it were Cooper, or Lila, or even Nathaniel, asking for help because their parents had vanished? “Hello?” she asked.

“Nat,” Clint said.

She’d heard men literally gutted who’d been in less pain than what Clint put into that syllable. His voice was hoarse. He’d been shouting. Crying. “I’m here,” she said.

“They’re gone,” he said. It was worse to hear it over the phone than it was to have him in front of her. If he’d been there, in front of her, she could have reached out to him. “All of them. I - I turned around, and they were just  _ gone _ . I went to look for them. I searched for hours. I found people on the road - they were looking too, they told me, they told me that they saw their families just turn to ash -”

He sobbed. In all the years she’d known him, she’d heard him cry only a few times before. The last time had been after Loki, one dark night he’d been too afraid to go back home. 

“Come find us,” she said. “We’re at our old headquarters. You don’t have to be alone right now. Most of us are still alive. Bruce and Thor are back - Steve’s here - the only one we don’t know about is Tony. We’re going to do something about this.”

Clint sobbed again, and it turned into a strangled, grotesque laugh halfway through. “Just like the old days? I  _ left _ the old days, Nat.”

“Clint -”

“You left out Wanda,” he said. “She’s gone too, isn’t she.”

Natasha focused on the plane. It was as good as anything else for her to focus on while she shut away the pain. No sign of movement from Bruce and Thor, though the raccoon had leapt up to start poking at the plane’s controls. The others were still talking. “Yes,” she said.

“Her too? No. Nat, I gotta - I gotta stay here. In case they come back. I’ll call you later.”

He hung up with a click. He hadn’t even asked  _ why _ or  _ how _ . Natasha knew that he wasn’t going to call her back.

 

\---

 

Tony did manage to get communications working. It was another drain on power, but if they could hail someone, he figured that could be as lifesaving as landing somewhere.

“You had better hope that my sister's friends keep translation software on that,” Nebula said from her position in the pilot’s seat, as Tony fiddled with the wires.

“Why’s that?” Tony asked.

“Because then you wouldn’t be able to understand a word we received,” Nebula snapped. Half-snapped. Half-snapping was her default mode of communication.

Tony didn’t take it personally. He couldn’t afford to. He had no idea how long he was going to be stuck in space, and if he died up here, he didn’t want it to be because he couldn’t get along with his roomie. “So you’re not speaking English right now?”

Nebula looked out at the darkness. “I don’t even know what that is,” she said. “I am speaking Xandarian Trade.”

“Interesting,” Tony said, although he was usually the furthest thing from interested in linguistics. Wasn’t much else to do up here. “So, what, do people just have Google translate in their brains?”

“A chip,” Nebula said, ignoring the Google translate comment. Tony didn’t know if it had translated. The potential for miscommunication seemed high. This was going to bug Tony as long as he was up here, or until the end of his life. Whichever came first. “Most people have them. Not many people install translation software on their ships.”

“I have to look at that code,” Tony said.

He was promptly thwarted by the fact he couldn’t read any of it. In space, Tony Stark was  _ illiterate _ . 

His new friend did at least agree to teach him some of the numbers. It kept Tony going for a few hours, until the pain in his side got bad again and the things he was  _ trying _ not to think about started to creep in at the edges. He was just about to call it a night - or lights-out sleepynightmaretime - when the console he’d just repaired crackled to life.

Tony didn’t understand a word of what whoever was speaking was saying, but he recognised the tone.

“It’s a distress call,” Nebula said, unnecessarily. “A trading vessel run by a family. Eight of them vanished. One of them damaged the ship in their grief.”

“Can we get to them?” Tony asked, imagining being stuck on a spaceship with the ashes of the dead. Imagining those particles getting sucked into the ship’s recyclers. The kid -

“No,” Nebula said.

Tony sagged into his chair. What was he going to tell Pepper about this? He’d thought about what he might want to say as a goodbye message, but every time he tried to record it, words failed him. He had to do better. He owed Pepper better. She knew him, he thought she knew him better than he knew himself, but that didn’t mean he didn’t  _ hurt _ her when he did stuff like go off chasing spaceships piloted by mirrorverse Spongebob characters.

He wondered if it would have been any different, for any of them, if he’d called Steve like Bruce wanted him to.

“What’s he like?” Tony asked Nebula, trying to divert his thoughts again, but still stuck on a grim path.

“What is  _ who _ like?”

“Thanos,” Tony said. “Your dad.”

She thought about attacking him. He could see it in her eyes. She might be a blue alien robot, but that didn’t mean much. Some of his best friends were robots and aliens. “He’s a monster,” she said.

“A good introductory statement, but I kind of got that when I found out he was planning to wipe out half of all life in the  universe,” Tony said. “What’s he  _ like _ ?”

“Justified,” Nebula replied bitterly. “Always justified, in his mind. He doesn’t do anything he doesn’t believe is justified, but he’ll do  _ anything _ if he thinks it is.”

That fit with the monster they’d encountered on Titan. Rational and logical…provided you accepted his premises, and his premises were warped. “I think I know the type,” he said. “Let me guess. He got worse over the years. Started enjoying it.” Obie had done everything for the good of Stark Industries. His vision of Stark Industries. And then he’d started liking what he did. Obie had been no saint even to start with, but he hadn’t been the sort of man who’d rip Tony’s heart out and leave him to die the whole time either.

“He was there when I met him,” Nebula said. Spat. “When he took me from the ruins of my planet, I had no cybernetics. Those came after. He gave them to me whenever Gamora bested me, to make me  _ better _ . He said it was because he cared.”

Tony winced. He remembered sitting on that sofa, paralysed, dying. One of the worst moments of his life, up there with his mother’s death, and Yinsen’s, and  _ Rogers _ , and the kid literally flaking apart in his arms all the while horribly aware of what was happening to him. The helplessness was one thing, control of his own body taken away from him, but knowing that he was dying because it was  _ Obie _ and he’d given up on Tony was even worse.

“He killed my sister,” Nebula continued. “He always favoured her.  _ Always _ . He said he loved her. But he killed her for the Stone anyway.”

“It wasn’t love,” Tony said, Obie’s fake smiles flashing in his mind. “Or if it was, I don’t know what he’s thinking, it wasn’t good enough. She was  _ your _ sister.  _ You _ loved her.”

Nebula half-screamed, half-snarled, and leapt out of her seat in an attempt to attack him. Then stopped, when all Tony had the energy to do was lean back out of her way. “She told him where the Stone was because of me,” she said. “She shouldn’t have.” Then she turned on her heel and left Tony alone.

He wished it was harder to argue that this Gamora shouldn’t have given up that location. At the same time he couldn’t imagine that Thanos had asked nicely. If he could chop limbs off Nebula…there wasn’t much  _ if _ to it. Tony couldn’t imagine standing by while someone hacked limbs off Rhodey.

Sometime afterwards he dropped off to a wholly unsatisfying, nightmare-laden nap in the co-pilot’s chair, still facing the stars. His own fault. The fight and the nightmares. He was losing track of time. His head felt stuffed with cotton and it wasn't just from the aftereffects of the wound.

He found Nebula on the lower deck. She didn’t seem to sleep much. Or maybe she just slept when he did, and woke earlier. Tony  _ was _ old and tired and wounded. It was possible.

“She loved you,” Tony said, by way of apology for putting his thumbs in her emotional wounds and generally rummaging around.

“I know,” Nebula replied. “I will kill our father - kill  _ Thanos _ \- for both of us.”

“Head of the line,” Tony said. “I promise. But in the meantime, how about I teach  _ you _ something…”

They killed a few more hours with paper football. There were worse things to do while slowly starving to death. They played until Nebula beat him for the third time and were just starting up another round when a strange light shone through the windows, golden like a sun. “We getting close to something we shouldn’t be?” Tony asked. He couldn’t hear or feel any sign of stress or strain in the ship’s machinery.

“No,” Nebula said. “I have no idea what that is.”

The light approached. It came closer, closer - it was smaller than a sun. Way smaller, and moving way faster. It rocketed right up to them and halted, blinding, in front of  the main view screen. Tony couldn’t see what it was in all that light. He could only barely make out a glowing, humanoid shape -

\- which reached out and tapped  _ shave and a haircut _ on the ship’s hull.

Tony looked at Nebula. Nebula looked at Tony.

The glowing figure outside extended a finger and started tracing lines on the clear material between them. This close the light was even worse, but he squinted and followed the finger or finger-like appendage doing the tracing as best he could.

_ Are you Tony Stark? _

Tony nodded, not sure what was going on.

More letters.

_ Need a ride? _

“I don’t think this is how hitchhiking is supposed to work,” Tony said, “but I’m not going to say no, either.”

 

—

 

The headache was finally going away. Bruce didn’t know how the action types handled it. Injuries  _ sucked _ .

It had been four days since Steve asked that Carol Danvers person to see if she should find Tony (she could do that, apparently, something to do with the Tesseract). Five since Thanos had obliterated half of all life on Earth (and everywhere else, too). Steve, Natasha, and Rhodey had all been out there, clearing roads, dealing with accidents, bringing in supplies, being  _ out there  _ and  _ visible _ so that people didn’t panic any more than they were already, quite rightly, panicking.

Bruce had never been the best at not getting people to panic. Besides, he was concussed. He and his non-calming demeanour and his concussion had been stuck on desk duty, making sure that Rocket didn’t tear apart  _ all _ of Tony’s things, that if Clint arrived he got to see a friendly face straight away, and that Thor didn’t do…something drastic.

There were a few wrecked spaceships in Wakanda that attested to Thor’s capacity for drastic. And Bruce had never seen his friend so quiet and still before.

His more brooding thoughts were interrupted with a beep. The pager that Danvers had given Fury, left here so she could communicate with them, was active again. She was coming back.

Bruce passed on the message to Steve, Nat, and Rhodey by phone.

Then Bruce went to find Thor.

The Asgardian was outside, standing under a deeply overcast sky, that new axe in hand. Rocket had explained how Thor had got it, at least. Thor was not looking at it, or at the sky, or at anything but the sight beyond the fence. 

A lot of the locals had congregated near Avengers HQ, hoping that they’d be able to do something, do  _ anything _ , about what had happened. Some had been hoping that they would be able to help the Avengers do something themselves. None had wanted to stay at home when their homes had become the mass graves of their loved ones. Steve thought they’d probably have a tent city around the compound for a while. Bruce was planning to head out there this afternoon and check on the health conditions. With as much bottled water as he could carry. Bruce Banner, far more powerful and useful than the Hulk.

“Danvers is on her way back,” Bruce said, walking up next to stand next to him.

Thor did not reply. A few of the muscles in his shoulders tightened.

“It’s a good thing,” Bruce said hurriedly. “If Tony had died fighting Thanos, she’d’ve been back a day or two ago. If he died in the Snap, she was supposed to keep searching for ten days, just in case. If she’s coming back now, she’s probably found him.”

“Good,” Thor said. “That is…good news.”

It was just about the first thing he’d said since Wakanda. Bruce pushed on. “It’s not your fault, you know that,” he said.

“I should have aimed for the head,” he said.

“I’m not an expert in axe throwing, but I would have thought the upper torso was a pretty good bet for killing him,” Bruce said. “If you didn’t kill him, you stood a good chance of severing some important nerves. Nobody blames you.” Aside from Thor himself, obviously. “We can still use your help.”

Thor threw the axe to the ground in a single, violent gesture. It stuck there, handle upraised, like a careless woodcutter had just dropped it there. “No,” he said. “I cannot help you.”

Bruce tried not to raise his eyebrows. “You’re the  _ God of Thunder _ ,” he said.

“I am the king of Asgard,” Thor replied. “Though anyone could do the job better than me, thus far. I will stay for Vision’s funeral, but then my place is with what remains of my people. I am no Avenger.”

“Thor  -”

“There’s a lot I need to learn about being a king in an Earth context,” Thor said, draping an arm around Bruce, acting as though a weight had lifted from his shoulders. “Obviously. Where do you think I should start?”

He barely stopped talking the whole way back to the compound. Bruce looked up. The weather had cleared. But as every Avenger knew, a stormy sky was their friend and ally.   
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading, and for comments/kudos/bookmarks! Next chapter will be up next week!


	3. Melting Down

Captain Danvers floated down from the sky, wreathed in golden light, and brought the entire spaceship with her. It was the sort of sight that made Steve want to find a church and thank God the most proper way he knew how.

No time for that, though, and God would understand him just as well here as in a church.

“Your friend’s injured,” Captain Danvers called down, when she saw them waiting by the area of lawn they’d cleared as a second landing area. The landscapers would also understand, the ones who were still alive. “Stabbed.”

Steve turned to Bruce. “Get the gurney,” he said.

“Get sedatives,” Captain Danvers said, more quietly. “I don’t think he’s had more than  four hours’ sleep in a stretch since the Snap.”

“I’ll get Pepper on the line,” Rhodey said.

“I’ll get everything else,” Bruce said.

Steve waited for Tony to emerge. He hadn’t seen his old friend in years, not in person. He hoped - well, he knew who he had to blame for the current state of their friendship. He hoped Tony could look past it under the circumstances. 

After a painful minute or so, a ramp extended from the side of the spaceship, peeling away like an orange’s rind. Two figures staggered down - Tony, pale and drawn, and someone he didn’t recognise. Someone blue. Steve rushed forwards; if the blue person was a threat Tony would be fighting and Danvers would have mentioned it, and his friend was hurt.

“Steve,” Tony said, eyes glazed. “I couldn’t stop him.”

“I couldn’t either,” Steve said. “None of us could.”

“The kid -” Tony broke off. “The kid vanished.”

The kid from Queens? How old was he? Sixteen? Seventeen? Steve opened his mouth, trying to find words, when behind him he heard the raccoon, Rocket, asking the blue person, “Where are they?”

There was no response. Which meant that they were dead.

“But it’s Quill’s ship,” Rocket said. “They have to be here.”

“They’re not,” the blue person said, in a low, feminine voice.

“None of them?” Rocket asked, voice cracking.

Leaning on Steve, Tony whispered, “Get me out of here.”

“Okay,” Steve said. He shouldn’t be watching this. He’d watched far too many people grieve in the last few days. “Here’s Bruce with the gurney. Rhodey’s calling Pepper for you.”

He saw Tony’s eyes brighten even as he sagged more heavily against Steve. Steve couldn’t even imagine how relieved he must be. “Pepper’s alive?”

“Keeping the phones working and the power on wherever she can,” Steve said. “I don’t know how many more people would have died without her. Thousands, probably.” When they’d asked if she wanted to come here and wait for Tony, she’d said yes - until she realised they didn’t know exactly when he’d be back. Then she’d said she had to stay in New York to do her job, and they should call her the instant Tony arrived, no matter what hour of the day or night.

They got Tony inside, and let him speak to Pepper in private, almost like they used to do in the days when they were all friends. Rocket had gone off somewhere to be alone as well. That left the blue woman, Nebula, who hadn’t introduced herself beyond giving her name.

“She’s one of Thanos’ daughters,” Captain Danvers said, keeping a cautious eye on their guest.

“I want nothing more than to see him dead,” Nebula replied, so much hatred in her voice that nobody could doubt her.

“Then where is he?” Captain Danvers challenged Nebula.

“We’ll talk about this later,” Natasha broke in. “Most of us have a funeral to conduct first.”

Most of them glanced over to the table where Vision’s body was lying, still wrapped in  Thor’s cape. Nobody had moved him or touched him. Someone - not Steve - had laid flowers down at his feet. Bruce, he suspected. “I’d prefer later, too,” he said. “Does anyone know if Tony’s friend from Queens has any family?”

“The kid?” Rhodey asked. “Spiderman?”

Steve nodded, and Rhodey swore. He went to find the details, too. Peter Parker, in his final year of highschool, orphaned young, adopted by his aunt and uncle. The uncle had been killed in a carjacking in front of Peter not that long ago, and only his aunt was left. God. Tony would want to make that call himself.

They lapsed back into the numb, grieving silence they spent most of their downtime in. Steve felt the itch to go belt some sandbags, like he had when he was just out of the ice. There was no hiding from this, though. In the quiet, they could hear Thor on the phone, negotiating with someone from the Norwegian government for land. It was good to see that at least one of them was doing a little better.

There was a crash as Tony hauled himself back into the main room. 

“You didn’t take those sedatives,” Natasha said.

“Of course I didn’t,” Tony said, barely looking at her. Steve was the focus of that laser-like attention now. “You told me the good news. What’s the bad?”

“Half the world’s population is gone,” Steve said. “Not counting the people who died trying to stop Thanos killing half the universe. It’s hard to tell with half the world’s ecologists missing, but so far as anyone can tell, half the animals in the world were killed as well. Governments aren’t coping, nobody’s coping. Thousands of people have already died from accidents, shock, lack of medical treatment, suicide. We might have food and clothes for now, but all our systems for producing more and distributing it are shot. Infrastructure’s going to start crumbling faster than we can repair it. We’re looking at a secondary and related death toll in the millions.”

Tony listened in unusually stoic silence. His jaw twitched. “We’re looking at total social collapse,” he said flatly. “The Black Death on steroids.”

They looked at each other. They hadn’t said it so bluntly. “Yes,” said Steve. “But first, we have a funeral.”

 

—

 

The funeral was for Vision. First, though, Natasha showed him to where they’d laid him. She let him peel back the red fabric they’d wrapped him in to reveal blank, sightless eyes and a gaping wound in his forehead. It looked like Thanos had just ripped the Stone out. Tony could see the dents of Thanos’ fingers in Vision’s outer casing.

He reached out and tried to smooth some of the wiring back into a more orderly fashion. “What happened?” he asked.

“He and Wanda were ambushed not long after you left the planet,” Natasha said. “He was almost paralysed, no way to defend himself. He offered to let Wanda destroy the Mind Stone, but -”

“But?”

“We decided not to,” Natasha said. If you didn’t know her, you wouldn’t think she hesitated over the sentence at all. Tony knew her. “We tried to find a way to get the Mind Stone out of him first. We ran out of time.”

Ran out of time. As in, Thanos arrived and stopped them. If they had held out a little longer - another five minutes - would Vision have survived? Would they have destroyed the Mind Stone? His friend might have lived. And the kid. And a few trillion more people, once you took all the aliens into account. “How are we doing this?” he asked.

“We checked his will.” Every Avenger had one. “A lot of it we can’t do for him, but he did ask to be melted down and have his metal recycled into something productive.”

“We can do that here,” Tony said. “Get Rhodey to start warming up the smelter. I’ll start separating out his components on the gurney. I don’t want to lay him to his eternal rest in a bunch of cardboard boxes.”

“You still haven’t slept,” Natasha said.

His limbs felt like lead, his fingers felt like rubber, and his wound was burning again. “Time for that later.” He couldn’t do a thing for people like May Parker, but Vision was his friend and he could do this.

Two hours later, everything was ready. What lay before him barely resembled Vision. A bunch of metal plates, some wires, some microcircuitry, some shards of plastic and strips of rubber. Disassembling him had felt like carving steaks off a human. Tony spread Thor’s cape back out over the remains. Still not very dignified, but the best he could do. 

They assembled near the smelter and silently laid out those components of Vision they could melt down and not just scorch and ruin. He’d never built robots with cremation in mind. Or burial, for that matter. When it was done, Tony looked to Rogers in spite of himself. Rogers was the sort of person who was good at funerals. The thought was not without a thick rush of bitterness.

He was glad when Thor got them started, with a simple, “He was worthy.”

“Wanda loved him,” Natasha added.

“He was our friend,” said Steve.

Their friend? Screw him. “And we know what that means to you,” he said. Rhodey elbowed him and mouthed  _ not now _ . He was right, too. Tony took  up the bundle of metal and said, “I guess this is goodbye. Hope you dream of electric sheep, buddy. Better things too.”

“Better things,” Rogers echoed, and that got taken up by the others.

Somewhat awkwardly, Tony put the bundle of parts that used to be Vision into the smelter’s input. Smelters weren’t built with funerals in mind, either. The heat quickly grew oppressive, and most retreated, duties done and the real goodbyes said while Tony was somewhere in space. Not Tony. He wanted the time. He needed the time. What happened here on Earth? Why hadn’t they stopped Thanos?

He should sleep. He knew he needed to sleep. How could he goddamn sleep? What  _ happened?  _ The Black Death on steroids, the end of the world, the kid crumbling to dust in his arms, how could they have lost? His head hurt. So did his stab wound.

He didn’t know how long it was before Rhodey came to get him. “You’re just torturing yourself,” he said.

“No,” Tony said. “No, I am trying to figure out what we could have done.” A suit in every city. They could have mobbed Thanos. They’d nearly  _ had  _ him back on Titan.

“Yeah. Torturing yourself. Come on. If you’re not going to sleep, you come with us and help plan what we’re going to do next.”

“Next,” Tony said, letting Rhodey usher him back towards the main compound. “What  _ next _ ? We’re done. We’re screwed. World’s ending! Whatever we  _ do _ isn’t going to make a difference!”

Somewhere during that sentence he realised he was shouting. The others were trying not to stare at him, he was shouting so loudly. 

Rogers, of course, was the one to step up. “I don’t believe that,” he said. 

So confident. So sure. Like a picture in a comic book, with all of the protective value. That was what Rogers was. A nice picture. A good idea. A paper shield. No use at all. Tony  _ hated _ him. For a second, he almost hated Rogers more than Thanos. More than himself. “So what are you planning to do?” he asked. “We all going to put on our superhero suits and fly somewhere to find Thanos and kill him? Newsflash -  _ he already won _ .”

“We know,” Rogers said, insufferably calm. Talking to Tony like Tony was a child. “But for the moment, blaming each other isn’t going to help. We have to move on -”

“Oh, like you know the first thing about moving on,” Tony sneered. “Still living in the past, hey,  _ friend _ ?”

Rogers’ jaw twitched. Tony was getting through. “To - Stark - you need to sleep.”

“Gonna send me to bed without any supper?”

Behind Rogers, he saw Golden Girl open her mouth to say something that started with “we might”, but then Romanov was there, silently shaking her head at their new glowing buddy, and the obvious signs of being  _ managed _ just made Tony even angrier.

“Don’t you get it?” he asked them all. “We fucked this up. We failed. We lost. And it’s  _ your _ fault.” He looked Rogers dead in the eyes. “A suit in every city. We could have  _ stopped _ him if we’d been prepared.”

“Do you really think now is the time for this?” Rogers snapped.

“The  _ time _ for it was years ago,” Tony snapped back.

“You’ve said yourself what we should do if we fail.”

_ Avengers _ . It made Tony sick just to think about it. And dizzy, too, darkness at the edges of his vision. “I was wrong,” he said. He turned around, which was a mistake. “You all do what you want. I’m done with it. All of it.”

He didn’t make it another step before he passed out.

 

—

 

The big man with the hair like sand and the same sickly pink-brown skin as Quill was the one to pick up Tony when he fell. Nebula kept a close eye on him. She did not know these people, but it was clear Tony did not like that one in particular. She had not spent all that time fixing him up only to see his own supposed allies kill him.

“He’s all right,” the sand-haired one said. “Just tired, I think.”

The sand-haired one passed him to the one with dark brown skin who walked with the metal frames around his legs, called either Rhodey, Rhodes, or James. The names would come in time. If she was here that long.

So far they hadn’t done anything to try and find her father. They hadn’t even talked about it. But as the Rhodey/Rhodes/James man and the other big man with yellow hair eased Tony’s body into one of the big soft chairs the humans seemed to like, Nebula thought that might be about to change. Everyone was in the same room, not outside those fences she’d seen in the distance.

It was the sand-haired man who spoke first. “All right. Whatever we do from here, the first step has to be finding Thanos. It’s a big universe out there.”

“Our best bet is tracking down the Infinity Stones,” the woman who had towed Nebula and Tony across the light years to Earth said. Danvers. Nebula couldn’t help but be wary of her. On the other hand, such a power could fight even Thanos. “Things that powerful leave their mark.”

“If we have the technology to do it,” one of the other humans said. This one was shorter. Soft. Nervous. “We worked on it for years and never managed a good way to track the Mind Stone. Even if the other stones are exactly the same, we’re going to need to extend their range and refine our sensors.”

“Any idea how long that might take?” the sand-haired one asked.

The soft one shrugged. “A few months?”

“I’ll help,” Rocket said. “You humies are ass-backwards. No offence.”

“None taken,” the red-haired human said. Nebula was wary of her, too. That one watched everyone carefully and kept her face still.

“So while Bruce” - Nebula tried to remember the name - “and Rocket do that, the rest of us will focus on tracking Thanos down in more mundane ways.”

The yellow-haired man stood and left without a word. Rocket glared after him, but the rest just shared glances. Nebula was missing something, and she did not like it. What she liked less was how they turned to her once he was gone.

“Captain Danvers said you’re Thanos’ daughter,” the red-haired human said.

“He took me from my home after slaughtering my people and raised me as a weapon,” Nebula said. “Thanos is the only father I have known.”

“Do you know anything about where he might have gone?”

Nebula scowled. She’d been trying to think. Trying to remember. So many of her thoughts weren’t her own once Thanos had augmented it with his machines. How could she know what he’d taken from her? Maybe she had known, once. “No,” she said. “I know his ships. His fleets. The ports he would go to for resupply. I know his captains and his plans. I do not know where he would go after he won.”

It was the sort of thing he would have told Gamora, but Gamora was dead. By Thanos’ own hand.

In the chair, Tony stirred.

“Then we go back to what we know of Thanos,” the sand-haired one said. “Nat?”

“He won’t be able to retire permanently,” Red Hair - Nat - said. “Too much ego. He thinks he’s saved the universe, he’ll want to come out of retirement and see the effects of his actions. Beyond that - I didn’t even see him, you know. I’m working off second- and third-hand information.”

“What about in the short term?” Danvers asked.

“Somewhere peaceful, probably,” Nat said.

Nebula nodded. “I agree. My father has spoken of how his work wearied him.”

“What does he like?” Nat asked her. “What does he find restful?”

“He likes growing things,” Nebula said. “Plants. Trees. Flowers.”

“Cities?”

“He avoids them whenever possible.”

Danvers snorted. “So we’re looking for a mass-murdering madman’s countryside retreat, somewhere in space. Great.”

Tony stirred again. “You’re still at it?” he asked. “How long was I out?”

“Only a few minutes,” Rhodey said. More people called him that, so Nebula would too. “Tony, you need to  _ rest _ . You want me to get Pepper on your case about this?”

“She’d be on my case anyway.” Tony stared around at the room. “Next step, geniuses,” he said. “Once you’ve found Thanos, what are you going to  actually  _ do _ about him? You held out all of, what, five minutes once he arrived on the scene? We fought him for a hell of a lot longer than that. He’s tough. Not just because of the Stones.  _ With _ them, he can do whatever the hell he wants -”

“Wait,” the soft man said. “Wait, wait, that’s it! With the Stones he can do whatever the hell he wants.”

“Very encouraging,” said Danvers.

“We take the Stones,” the soft man said, “or the Gauntlet, and  _ we _ use it.”

Use it -?  And - Gamora? Just like that? Nebula’s weakness in being captured, her sister sacrificing herself, just like that, not mattering anymore because she’d be alive? There was a moment of stunned silence. 

Then - “How?”

The sand-haired man rubbed at his forehead.

“No, seriously, how?” Tony demanded. “He’s still big, he’s still bad, and when we go fight him, he’s still going to have the Gauntlet.”

“You know, Stark, I’m getting a little tired of being told what we can’t do,” the sand-haired man said.

“And  _ I’m _ getting a little tired of  _ you _ refusing to accept reality,” Stark said. “But that’s never been your strong suit, has it, Rogers.”

“If you don’t want to be here, you might as well leave,” Rogers said.

Tony struggled to his feet. “Fine. I will. Someone’s got to keep this world in one piece as long as possible. It’s not going to be you and your wishful thinking.”

He stalked out as best he could when he was so obviously tired. Rhodey shrugged at the rest of them and followed his friend.

Nebula stayed. She didn’t know these people, and they didn’t know her or her sister, but Tony had promised her that she’d be first in line when they went to kill Thanos. She intended to hold him and his friends to that, whether or not there was any wishful thinking involved.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading and any comments/kudos/bookmarks! Next chapter will be up next week!


	4. After the End

Even if the catering wasn’t quite what Bruce would have expected from a party hosted by Tony Stark, Bruce thought, the bride looked fantastic. Tony was a lucky man. And not just because Pepper looked fantastic.

It was clear to see, even under the circumstances, that Tony knew he was a lucky man. He wasn’t even trying to stop smiling, and his eyes never strayed from her long. By the time Rhodey handed him the ring, he was grinning like a loon. Bruce couldn’t help smiling either.

“They make a good couple,” Wong said.

“You don’t have to tell me,” Bruce said. “By all accounts he was even more of a disaster before they started dating.”

“Was that before or after the  _ I am Iron Man _ thing?”

Bruce frowned. “I don’t know. I never asked.”

In front of the small group of people, the celebrant pronounced Tony Stark and Virginia Potts to be husband and wife. There was applause, and more than a little bit of sobbing. Bruce could understand why. Over the past month, he’d seen plenty of people break down crying. That wasn’t going to change any time soon. Bruce felt like breaking down crying himself from time to time - and  _ had _ .

It was just tears, though. The anger was all his. The Hulk still refused to come out. It had been a long time since Bruce had felt so secure in himself.

Ceremony done, the party started. Such as it was. Even with only half the world to feed, the food couldn’t get to where it was needed. Like cities. And that was assuming the food got off the farms in the first place. Tony and Pepper’s wedding dinner was pasta with a little bit of butter, thyme, and oregano, a single apple per guest for dessert, and it was the best meal Bruce had eaten for two weeks.

There was plenty of good alcohol, if you liked that sort of thing. Tony had been saving the contents of his bar, it seemed.

He was making it last when Tony wandered over to him in the half-as-big-as-it-should-have-been crowd. “Hey, Bruce,” he said casually. “Haven’t seen you for a while.”

“No,” Bruce agreed. Not since Tony got back from space, not even a week after the Snap. “Thanks for inviting me, though, since I was …gone…for two years.”

“No problem,” Tony said. “Just a little sabbatical in space. And how’ve you been in the past few weeks?”

“Lying low, mostly. The Accords might not be uppermost in people’s minds right now, but Ross is still around. Figured I probably shouldn’t give him an excuse.” Tony’s mouth twisted at the mention of the Accords - Bruce had heard all about  _ that _ \- but he also figured that if any single Avenger would understand why Bruce couldn’t support anything Ross had a hand in, it would be Tony. “Just hanging around at the old headquarters, mixing it up between water purification and searching for the Infinity Stones.”

Tony’s mouth twisted further. “Stick to the water purification,” he advised.

“No choice,” Bruce said. “You remember how there were a bunch of people camping outside? They’re inside now. Can’t get bottled water, and the mains went last week, so we’re on rainwater. Reminds me of some of the places I travelled through when I was on the run after Harlem. ”

“It’s a bit like that at Stark Tower,” Tony said. “We’ve still got mains water, but it’s all Pepper can do to keep the one building running.”

It had been in the news broadcasts. Stark Tower, never meant to be a home, was housing thousands in its offices. Running water to one of the places organising care for the old, young, and disabled had to be a priority. Lots of housebound people had survived the Snap, now horribly vulnerable, spread across buildings meant for twice as many people. “You get any of the riots?”

“A few scuffles, nothing major. Most people get that the supermarkets can’t just stock up anymore, but if you will break into apartments and take all the food that hasn’t rotted, people can get a little testy.”

Once upon a time, Bruce might have been one of those testy people. Since the Hulk, though, he’d got used to having to drop everything and go on the run. Owning things was a bit of a luxury to him now. Never thought the experience would stand him in such good stead. “What are  _ you _ doing with your time?” he asked.

“Bit of this, bit of that,” Tony said offhandedly.

“A few scuffles,” Bruce said.

“Maybe,” Tony replied. “That and getting buildings on their own power generation. The grid’s not going to last either. We can do with emergency lights, but summer’s not going to last forever.”

“Of all the things to be grateful for,” Bruce said, smiling grimly, taking the same calming breaths as he used to when the Hulk might come out at any moment.  _ I’m always angry. _ He still was. “If Thanos had snapped his fingers in November…”

“Don’t celebrate yet,” Tony said, “we’ve got to get through forest fire and hurricane season first.”

He’d almost forgotten. He’d been in his lab so long, he wasn’t looking at the bigger picture. All the more reason to keep looking for the Infinity Stones, as far as he was concerned, and fix the root cause of the problem.

But Tony wouldn’t want to hear it, and of all days, Bruce did not want to spoil this one with a fight. “Planning to go anywhere for the honeymoon?” he asked instead.

Tony grinned. It only looked a little forced. “We considered Malibu but the flights were horrendous. Besides, things around here would fall apart without Pepper.”

They looked to where the bride was doing her own rounds of their reduced reception, mascara smudged from crying. Not all of the tears had been happy ones.

“God, Tony, I’m sorry,” Bruce said. “You both deserved better.”

Tony’s smile was brittle, but his voice was matter-of-fact. “It’s what we’ve got and I’m glad for it. Can’t spend all our time living in the past.”

Bruce raised his glass of water and clinked it against Tony’s glass, still with a quarter-inch of some of the last good scotch in the world. “I’ll drink to that,” he said.

 

—

 

At least Bruce came back with photos.

“Pepper looks great,” Steve said.

“If anyone could find a wedding dress at the end of the world it would be her,” Natasha observed, not inaccurately from what Steve knew of her.

He missed being friends with Tony. He wished his congratulations were something Tony would accept. He might not have agreed with Tony all the time, about important things, even, but he didn’t doubt that Tony was the best defender Earth had. He meant well, and losing the friendship hurt. Losing Tony’s respect hurt more.

Steve put the thought to the back of his mind. There was nothing he could do about it, no matter how much he wanted things to be different. “It looks like it was a lovely wedding,” Steve said to Bruce. “Thanks for showing us.”

“I’ll send the pictures to Clint and Thor,” Natasha said.

“You heard from them?” Steve asked.

“Thor, yes,” Natasha said. She took out her own phone, turned it on - battery charge was something to be carefully conserved, now that electricity supply was less reliable - and found the message. This one had a photo too. Thor in plain clothes, like you saw on construction workers, covered in sawdust. The most surprising thing was the eyepatch -

“Oh, yeah, his sister cut his eye out during their fight,” Bruce said, noticing Steve’s surprise. “Don’t know where he got the fake eye from.”

“Me,” Rocket said, hopping up on the table next to them. “Are you jokers done with this wedding crap? The others are due to report in tonight and I don’t want to tell them ‘sorry we didn’t make any progress tracking down Thanos because we were looking at pretty dresses.’”

The important thing was, Steve thought, it was just another thing Thor had lost. Thor hadn’t said anything about it, about  _ any _ of it, just left to go welcome the shattered remains of his people to Earth. Bruce was the one who’d told them what happened to Asgard.

Just thinking about it made Steve feel sick.

Bruce and Nat gave into Rocket’s pestering. The raccoon-alien was as temperamental a genius as Steve had ever met, but there was no denying he was a great help. Particularly when it came to solar power. Steve gathered that Rocket thought human solar power technology was barely above sharpened sticks. And when it came to hunting down Thanos, already he’d extended the range of Bruce’s devices by half.

With those two gone, Steve was left to his own devices. His own devices meant looking after the camp that had relocated to the inside of Avengers HQ.

The first wave of people to arrive had wanted to help, wanted to fight, and thought that this was the place to organise. The second wave of people were scared and grieving. They were looking for strength and safety, fleeing riots and paralysis in the cities as well as their own losses. They were doing their best to provide, but they had nearly a thousand people here now, packed into rooms, living in tents outside.

Steve had work to do.

The first stop on his rounds were the kitchens. “Everything right down here?” he asked today’s shift.

“Nothing’s right down here, Captain,” one of the cooks called back with grim humour. “You’ll see at dinnertime.”

“We’ve got a truck coming in from a local farm,” Steve promised. “Road’s clear the whole way.” Of course, given how farms worked these days, it meant they were going to get a truckful of one sort of vegetable only. Peas, Steve thought. Lots and lots of peas. But they had food, and that was the important thing. He moved on.

The next stop was where they handled the drinking water, over on the other side of the grounds from where they had the extra bathroom facilities set up. The building’s plumbing had never been meant for a thousand people.

Then there was the room where some of the older children were looking after the younger kids. After a few weeks, the children especially had moved on from the numbness of denial and were well into anger. Even when Steve walked in, there were a pair of children fighting, the older girl supervising the whole group looking at her wit’s end. She should have been studying, or getting ready for homecoming, or  _ something _ , other than this position of responsibility.

At least the kids didn’t seem to be that invested in the fight. From their guilty faces - two girls about eight or so - it looked like they were just blowing off steam. That was not a thing Steve knew how to deal with very well.

It was times like this he wished Clint was there, if only for his experience with children. But nobody had heard from Clint directly since he’d called Natasha. Other than that, there were only a few descriptions matching him, in the worst of the riots in Chicago, and then in the chaos in Atlanta and Dallas. Steve was worried. Nat was worried. Everyone was worried.

He missed Sam, too.

And there was nothing Steve could do about that right now either. Instead, he had to deal with these kids himself. He crouched down so that he was eye level with the combatants. “Was this really the best way to solve your problems?” he asked.

There was a bit of mumbling in the theme of  _ No, Captain America _ . 

“Why don’t you go to opposite ends of the room and find something to do?”

They agreed, but only because he was Captain America. They wouldn’t listen to the people actually looking after them.

Steve walked through the gardens they were planting and the past the chicken coops they were building. He visited the outside bathrooms - they  _ really _ needed to figure something out there. He smiled and greeted people and tried not to let his knowledge show on his face - 

\- this was not sustainable. If they didn’t do something about this soon, most of them were going to die in the next few months.

 

\---

 

It had been a while since Carol worked  _ with _ someone. Much less someone she thought might be an enemy, willingly or unwillingly. She didn’t question that Nebula hated Thanos. She just wasn’t sure what happened at the death. Family could get in your head.

It had also been a long time since she’d used a spaceship. The  _ Benatar _ , according to the aptly-named Rocket, who appeared to be its captain and sole surviving owner. Rocket had stayed behind on Earth to help tracking down the Infinity Stones, but not before he’d given them some assistance.

“There’s an energy spike ahead,” Nebula said. “Fading, but present.”

“I’ll go check it out.” Just in case things got complicated. A bit of fiddling with the airlocks - another reason for not bothering with the spaceship at all - and Carol was out flying through space again.

From here it was like nothing had changed at all. She flew onwards, into an asteroid field. Those were always fun. Good dodging practice. She felt like a pilot again when she flew through asteroid fields.

She stopped dead when she rounded the last big rock, and then flew right back to Nebula. The other woman let her in. Carol didn’t bother with niceties; Nebula never bothered with them either. “We were heading towards a planet, right?” she asked.

“Yes,” Nebula said. “It doesn’t have a name. Thanos used it as a training and testing ground.”

“It’s not there anymore,” Carol told her.

Nebula wasn’t one to say  _ what?  _ Or  _ how? _ Carol imagined that living with Thanos would break a girl of that quickly.  Instead, Nebula leaned into the controls and gunned it towards their mark. She noticed the asteroids too;  she had to. The  _ Benatar _ wasn’t as tough as Carol was.

And then she saw what Carol had seen. The planet wasn’t there - not in the form of a planet, anyway. Half of it had been blasted away. They could see the marks where the inner layers of the planet had been exposed by the blast, now cooled to a different shade of rock in the unforgiving cold of space.

A planet. Not far off the size of Earth. Broken and shattered like a carelessly dropped glass on a hard floor.

“Any idea what happened?” Carol asked, though she thought she might have a pretty good idea.

“Yes,” Nebula said.

Sounded about right.

When they called the Avengers a few hours later, it was Natasha Romanov who answered. It usually was. Carol was more comfortable with Rogers, but she understood that he was needed around the place to look heroic and keep panicking civilians halfway sane. With Romanov, on the other hand, Carol could never shake the feeling that Romanov was constantly trying to work out some way to kill her, just in case. Romanov nodded cordially.

“We found something,” Nebula said, before Romanov could ask.

Romanov raised an eyebrow. It was a very precise change of expression, the arch high enough to convey inquiry, but not so high as to make  her look sceptical. Carol wondered if she’d practiced it with a ruler.

“One of Thanos’ old stomping grounds, according to her,” Carol said, with a much less articulate and precise jerk of her head towards Nebula. “Exploded.”

A second raised eyebrow joined the first. “How exploded are we talking about?” Romanov asked.

“Half,” Nebula said. “Half the planet was rubble, the rest remained intact.”

“You think it’s an Infinity Stone?”

“It was a single blast that did it,” Nebula said flatly. The voice of long experience, Carol couldn’t help but think. “I know of few other things that would produce that result. None on that planet. It had no permanent inhabitants.”

“You were right about Thanos not being able to stay in retirement,” Carol told Romanov.

She accepted the verification without a hint of surprise. “What was he using the Stones for?” she asked, seemingly to herself, though again Carol doubted someone that precise said anything aloud she didn’t mean to. “What does he want?”

“He could be trying to destroy the Stones,” Nebula said.

Romanov sat up even straighter, and beckoned to someone off screen. Banner came to sit next to her, alarm on his face. “That fits,” she said. “If he destroys the Stones, nobody can ever affect what he did.”

“Is that even possible?” Carol wondered. Nebula glanced over to her, then back to Romanov, obviously with the same question.

“Yes,” Romanov and Banner said together. They looked at each other, then Banner went on, “We tried destroying the Mind Stone. Wanda’s powers came from it, so we thought she might be able to, once we got it out of Vision. She could, it was just - Thanos had the Time Stone. He undid it.”

“And this Wanda?” Carol asked, alarmed. They’d mentioned her before, but not in the context of destroying an Infinity Stone. If Thanos found her -

“Dead in the Snap,” Romanov said.

That was the most minor of minor reliefs. Carol turned to Nebula next. “Does Thanos know any other ways of destroying Infinity Stones?”

Nebula shook her head. “I don’t know,” she said. “He would not have confided it in me if he’d even thought of destroying one. If he knew for certain - I think he would have tried earlier.”

“Can we even be sure that he didn’t succeed in destroying one or more of them when he blew the planet up?” Carol asked.

“Probably not,” Romanov said. “It doesn’t make a difference to us, though. We’re on a time limit. If we want to fix this, we need to get the Infinity Stones before Thanos can destroy them. We can’t afford to waste any more time. We need everyone we can get.”   
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the delay! Next chapter will also be up in two weeks. Thanks for reading!

**Author's Note:**

> Anyway, this is how my beta reader/practical co-author and I are dealing with the things we disliked about Endgame. There was definitely stuff. But there was also stuff we liked, and you know how it is with fandom and conflicted feelings...
> 
> Thanks for reading and any feedback you might leave!


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